We’re coming up on everyone’s favorite summer blowout holiday, Independence Day, the day Columbus freed the slaves and killed Paul Revere. To best celebrate this most hallowed of summer holidays, you should probably have a party. Thing is, you need to be careful. Party ruining scumbags are around every corner. Be wary of them!

Captain America

Where You’ll Find Them: Emblazoned with the American flag on their short, shorts, socks, hat, several pins, tiny flag and potentially on the icing of the store-bought cake they brought.

How They’ll Ruin Your Party: The celebrating of holidays is very much a social experience in our modern era. The reason for the season notably falls by the wayside for almost any major day from Christmas to Thanksgiving, not even necessarily because the reason is meaningless to us, but because it happens every year and we’re so far removed from the origins of these holidays that now the joy we experience is from the time off and the ability to be with friends and loved ones. Captain America, however, loves America and demands you love it, too. He’s somehow convinced that referencing the country you live in as much as possible makes him more patriotic and somehow better than you and anyone else not currently baking a pie and fighting illegals. His constant harping on the subject will alienate everyone and make you all feel like you’re enduring a grade school play directed by a madman.

The Lush

Where You’ll Find Them: Either on the way to the cooler/fridge or stumbling aimlessly around the yard trying to talk to the people who are trying to escape him. Or passed out in his own vomit.

How They’ll Ruin Your Party: Listen, we all like a drunk, but within reason. Within reason is a key term there and the ignorance of such is why things like AA exist. No one wants a guy puking in their begonias while trying to chat up people next to the barbecue. When you drink to the point of having loosened inhibitions and being a little more fun and frolicsome, then that’s great. When you need help standing because gravity is continually pulling a fast one on you then you’re just an eyesore with a pulse that’s making everyone awkwardly afraid of you coming over and showing them your penis and/or crying about your first love who left you to become a missionary.

The Baby

Where You’ll Find Them: Within arm’s reach of a boob.

How They’ll Ruin Your Party: The thing about children is this – everyone loves kids. Except when you hate them. Don’t feel bad about hating defenseless babies, everyone does. Why do you think gerbils eat their young? It’s not that they’re callous little monsters, it’s that they care too much. Too much about their own sanity and relaxation. They have to eat their babies to stop the madness.

At your party, the baby can and will hate the sun, the smoke from the barbecue, mosquitoes, ants, the pool and fireworks which, to a baby, all appear like the fearsome hand of Satan trying to claw their face off and shove it inside the mouth of a plague rat. Babies think that about everything and their natural defense against this is rampant crying. Never ending, unignorable crying.

The Pyromancer

Where You’ll Find Them: Splitting time between the barbecue and wherever you’re keeping the fireworks for later.

How They’ll Ruin Your Party: Listen, no one really likes fireworks, not that much. They’re cool for a minute because they’re fiery and potentially deadly and that’s great and all, but the Pyromancer is going to be the guy who needs to be in charge of the lighter at all times as though he’s the mysterious 5th member of the A-Team and directly responsible for the advent of C4. No one likes a control freak, they like them even less when they organize people to watch things get blown up when they could be spending their time drinking beers and not being made to stand back 30 paces.

The Unprepared Vegan

Where You’ll Find Them: Far away from the barbecue, passive aggressively moaning and sighing at everyone having hot dogs and hamburgers.

How They’ll Ruin Your Party: Before you get your panties in a bunch, know that in 2012 we all know vegans and have generally accepted them as real people. The problem is when they show up to a party and expect that they alone will be catered to differently than everyone else and take no responsibility for their own happiness. As such, when they show up unable to eat any of the food, rather than accept it with good cheer, they get pissy and make everyone else who’s happy to eat the face of a dead cow slathered in cheese and ketchup feel bad.

Your Parents

Where You’ll Find Them: Wherever you are.

How They’ll Ruin Your Party: They’re your parents. You invited them out of some genetic guilt and damn their hides, they came.